Now a days Apple is everywhere, first it came up with the SDK for iPhone for which developers all over the world were eagerly waiting. Then yesterday I read that a Gartner Analyst who tracks Apple has said that Apple has given orders of 10 million 3G iPhone, another of Apple’s eagerly awaited iPhone variant. Sometime back there was a rumor saying Apple patenting the clamshell iPhone. Before all this dies down one more patent has been filed by Apple and this time it is of a LCD display, which can take photos and videos. The display screen of the iPhone is very much interactive and this time it will also serve as a digital camera. The display would be made of thousands of microscopic image sensors between the LCD cells that make up the display. These image sensors will be responsible for capturing each microscopic part of the image. The phone will have a special software which would collate these small image captures in one full image. Cool, well Apple is known to do cool things but their secretive behavior turns me off!! By the way if you dont know the next version of Apple iPhone, which is 3G enabled will also have a camera on the front display and you can easily do video conferencing with your iPhone.
From the Apple Patent filing: “A device comprising: a display area; an array of display elements located within the display area, each display element capable of displaying a pixel of information, either alone or in combination with other display elements; and an array of image elements located within the display area, each image element being capable of capturing visual information from a source in front of the display area; wherein each image element has a lens that does not interfere with any display elements.”